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Baseball and swamps
By Tarek Atia
Writer Ziauddin Sardar's comment that "terrorism breeds in the swamp of injustice," may provide a clue to the overwhelmingly mysterious nature of the threat currently facing America – and the world.
Baseball is back in America -- and that's the way it should be. There was something very arresting about the week-long cancellation of the national past-time, as though we weren't quite the same nation anymore.
That's the jist of a lot of the talk we've been hearing these days. People are saying American innocence has been lost, that civil liberties are going to be curtailed. All that may be true -- but to say that it will have a profound effect on America belittles the very thing that makes us Americans. Our fundamental belief in the simple just-ness of our being.
Baseball is an expression of that. It's a clean game, played without the naked excitement of more modern-television-enhanced spectacles like football and wrestling. Sure it's televised worldwide, but it's still the same slow, methodical game.
That's America, despite the hype and despite Hollywood. Despite what New York and California want us to be. And definitely despite CNN already making it final: "America's New War".
Every war needs an enemy, and this one is still being determined.
Nevertheless, all fingers are pointing towards a terrorist mastermind named Osama Bin Laden. And whether or not Bin Laden really did it, a large swathe of the world's population has been unfairly branded as being of bin Laden's dastardly, inhuman, un-American kind. That includes a lot of true-blue red-blooded Americans who happen to also be Muslims or Arabs. They have become fearful for their lives over the past few days. Why? Because there have been killings, beatings, threats. Their places of worship have been shot at and bombed. They have been hiding in their homes -- in America -- scared of their own next door neighbors or a gang of ruffians playing a dangerous game of blind, home-town revenge.
The atmosphere is rapidly becoming as un-American as an America without baseball.
An America without the stock exchange, even if you don't trade stocks. After all, some things are just there, because they have to be -- little things like liberty, equality, and justice for all. A week or so after the September 11 attacks, the outward symbols of the familiar America were finally back in place. I'd like to think the inward ones had never left -- that they'd just experienced a momentary lapse of reason.
That return to normalcy is a welcome relief. And it looks to be contagious. President Bush visited the Islamic center in Washington DC, just down the street from the White House, and said those who had vented their anger at fellow Americans should be ashamed. Bush's visit revealed just how serious the attacks against Arab and Muslim Americans had been. Those who attacked Muslims in the wake of the attack, President Bush said, were the "worst of humankind."
He's absolutely right.
And hopefully, he'll heed his own advice when deciding where to take America next. Everybody agrees that whoever or whatever did this horrible act must be punished and stopped -- and anybody else thinking about doing something like it must also be deterred. But until now, no one has taken credit for the dastardly deed. That, in itself, is a strange phenomenon, especially if this really is a war. In most wars, the victors of battles do not hesitate to make themselves heard.
Why hasn't anyone spoken up this time?
Interviewed on CNN, writer Ziauddin Sardar's comment that "terrorism breeds in the swamp of injustice," may provide a clue to the overwhelmingly mysterious nature of the threat currently facing America – and the world. Arguing against a potentially ineffectual military strike, Sardar explained that you could kill a million mosquitoes in a swamp but as long as the swamp was still there, another million mosquitoes would be back tomorrow.
The swamp of injustice, for much of the world, is spawned by the US. According to Sardar, no small number of people around the world see a lack of compassion in American foreign policy, or the injustice of the fact that the US always supports Israel, and doesn't sympathize with those suffering from globalization.
"Terrorists work on this," Sardar said, "saying, no one listens to your suffering. I'll take revenge on your behalf."
Was this an act of revenge on behalf of all the world's people who are either suffering from an uncompassionate American foreign policy, blind US support for Israel, or forced, painful entry into globalization?
If true, we'd be talking about a most formidable enemy indeed. Not the kind of enemy you can really go after with gung-ho declarations of war. Are we -- president Bush included -- letting the hate-mongers – in this case outwardly sophisticated people with nonetheless the same reflexive, un-American mentality as those who attacked their fellow citizens for no legitimate reason – unduly influence where our country heads next?
If it's a war we need then it's the toughest war of all. The one within ourselves, to discover where we might have gone wrong.
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